Before the lights go out, before the money suddenly disappears from your
bank accounts, before planes fall from the sky, before Y2K rears its ugly
head, Microsoft will bring Windows 2000 to market. Honest. After years
of missed launch dates and broken promises, recrafted strategies and skirted
deadlines, the next great leap in Microsoft operating-system technology
is at hand. As of September, company spokespeople and executives were saying
(strictly on the QT, of course) that W2K would ship before December 31.
Now for the real news: The release will come not so much with fist-pumping
enthusiasm as with a tremendous sigh of relief from Jim Allchin, the Microsoft
senior VP who has been the biggest champion of the Windows franchise in
recent years.

The market first expected this major upgrade to the Windows NT OS back
in 1995. Five years later, you'd think Microsoft would have ironed out
the product. And yet, by the start of the fourth quarter, the launch date
remained uncertain because W2K still had bugs. Which is actually no great
surprise. Any complex software the size of Windows 2000 - there are 29
million lines of code in the client version alone - will have bugs. But
Allchin says many of the bugs, and the resulting delays, were caused by
a "sloppiness" that has forced a reassessment of the development process.

"When you're moving so fast, it's easy to let leakages happen," says the
48-year-old commander of the consumer and enterprise versions of Windows
as well as the streaming-media group. "You're driving the team: 'Make progress
in this particular area.' And they're saying, 'I don't quite have the interface
I need on this other piece.' We're driving 'em, so they change it." But
overlapping changes cause cascading errors, better known as bugs. "And
it can be quite depressing," says Allchin, "with so many bugs that everybody
knows exist."

Windows 2000 (renamed last fall from NT 5.0) was originally intended to
be much more than an upgrade: It was supposed to unify the corporate OS
- Windows NT - with the consumer OS - Windows 9x. At last, the DOS technology
underlying the consumer operating system would give
way to the more stable NT kernel. While
the unification would go unnoticed by most users, it was meant to be a
show of faith to developers. No longer would they need to write separate
code for consumer and corporate software.

Alas, W2K won't meet that promise. Earlier this year, Microsoft admitted
that the common code base is still years off. Even the DOS-based
next-generation
consumer OS - codenamed Millennium - has been pushed back to 2001. Don't
expect Neptune, a consumer OS based on NT, until at least a year later.
(Millennium and Neptune are on parallel tracks within Allchin's groups.)

By now, of course, missed ship dates and buggy releases have become the
MO at Microsoft. Analysts, beta users, and the media seem to have built
delays and bugs into their expectations. Reviews suggest that W2K combines
the stability of NT with the best of Windows 98 - power management, for
instance. As a result, the product should do well at market. International
Data Corporation projects Microsoft's share of server units sold worldwide
to increase from 38 percent in 1998 to as much as 44 percent in 2003 -
thanks in large part to W2K.

Beyond the numbers, though, is a metastory. It ends with the realization
that, despite the sell-through projections, Allchin - a nine-year veteran
of Microsoft and an indefatigable perfectionist - fell short
of his goal. But the most interesting part
of the story, as usual, is what happened along the way.

Allchin never sought the spotlight. He was nonetheless thrust into it last
winter as part of Microsoft's botched attempt, during its antitrust trial,
to discredit a government witness with an amateurishly doctored video.
The incident made international news and undermined the software giant's
already battered image. In the process, Allchin - a man praised by colleagues
and peers for his intense pride and integrity - was sideswiped.

At the trial, government witness Edward Felten, a Princeton University
computer science professor, claimed to have written a program that could,
contrary to Microsoft's claims, uninstall the Internet Explorer browser
without adversely affecting the OS. To refute Felten's point, Microsoft
attorneys and marketers pushed forth Allchin, accompanied by a video
demonstrating
that Felten's uninstall did indeed hurt the performance of a computer running
Windows.

While Microsoft's claim may have technically been true, the video was a
fake. As government attorneys quickly pointed out, the tape had been cobbled
together from footage of several different machines. Gates called the incident
an embarrassment. No one was more humiliated than Allchin.

Months later, when I asked him in an email to explain what happened, Allchin
dismissed the ordeal - in nine passionate, lengthy paragraphs. "I had people
come to my office and basically break down, saying it killed them to know
my integrity was questioned because of [their] mistake," he wrote.
"Personally, I let this go a long time ago. People were trying to save
me time. In retrospect, I should have done it myself. The sad thing is
that this is such a small point: an interesting newspaper/dinner topic,
but not the point at all.

"The question," he continued, "is whether we did something good for consumers
and whether our innovation of integration offered compelling value. Innovation
to win customers is what business is all about. We innovated through unifying
the browsing experience for local files, server files, and Internet files.
I stand by this."